Hey – don’t mow that field just yet!
As dairy farms continue yielding to house lots, more and more of us find ourselves in possession of old hayfields and pastures. Since these open spaces are such beautiful parts of the landscape, many people want to keep them open. This, in turn, means that the fields need to be mowed regularly to keep the forest at bay. If you are lucky enough to own a hayfield or pasture, and growing grass isn’t central to your economic livelihood, consider letting your field grow tall this summer and not cutting it until August or September.
Waiting until then will make a big difference to local wildlife.
Take the red-winged blackbird, for example, whose welcomed song on March mornings is among the first harbingers of spring. One of the redwing’s preferred nesting sites is the tall grass of fields near wet areas, where a pair may raise as many as three broods per year between late April and mid-July. Cutting the hay during this time period not only eliminates the redwing’s habitat but also can crush any eggs or chicks hiding in the grass.
The situation is even more critical for the bobolink, which nests exclusively in fields and pastures. Unlike the red-winged blackbird, the bobolink typically has only one brood per year, making a tractor incursion during nesting season all the more devastating. Bobolink fledglings are likely to be hidden in the hay until as late as the Fourth of July. The eastern meadowlark, the upland sandpiper, and the field, savannah, grasshopper, and vesper sparrows all have similar nesting requirements.
Whitetail does often utilize the protection of tall grass to stash a fawn or two in the early weeks of June. Fawns during the first few weeks of their lives have no scent. Several acres of tall hay, therefore, make a great hiding place where a fawn can gain strength out of sight of calculating coyote eyes.
And then there are the bugs and insects that rely on tall grasses and flowering weeds. Some of these are as beloved as the firefly, whose June numbers are much greater over uncut fields than over cut ones, or as terrifying as the ambush bug, which waits under the flowers of boneset and milkweed in August to attack and devour unsuspecting bees. Though these insects aren’t as charismatic as spotted fawns or baby chicks, they’re still an integral part of the larger ecosystem.
All of which is to say, if you have a choice in when to mow your field or pasture, choose later rather than sooner. You’ll still have the beauty of land kept open for future years, and the birds and bees will have the benefit of tall-grass habitat during the prime summer season.
Of course, you can also mow your field only every third year or so. In addition to saving the time, expense, and fuel required for annual mowing, you will be creating a habitat where brush intermingles with grass – even better for bobolink, and not bad for woodcock or possibly cottontails. If raspberries spring up, so will bears and other animals who feast on berries. Don’t try this three-year approach, however, if you have plans to bring the field back into hay at some point – it’s a major operation to return raspberry thickets to grasses and clover.
And don’t pull your local dairy farmer down from the tractor this week to confront him or her with this article. Cutting hay in June may be terrible for an individual bobolink but is of great benefit to bobolinks overall. The patchwork pattern of corn fields, hay fields, heifer pastures, and open space that makes for such great wildlife habitat is a direct result of our dairy farming economy. As long as dairy farming remains viable in Vermont and New Hampshire, we will always benefit from the diversity of wildlife habitat that dairying creates. If we stopped cutting hay and let all our pastures revert to forest, the bobolink and meadowlark would escape the cutter bar only to find that the old neighborhood had grown in.
For dairy farmers, cutting hay now captures the nutrition of the first flush of spring grass and sets the stage for a second or third cutting of hay later in the summer. If dairy farmers weren’t out right now cutting hay, it would make matters worse for yet another critter that’s becoming increasingly rare in northern New England these days: the dairy cow.